Stanford Archives – The Green Optimistic

New Synthetic Designer Carbon Boosts Lithium-Sulfur Battery Performance

Mila Luleva — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 10:21:31 +0000

Engineers from University of Stanford developed a synthetic form of activated carbon, which can boost Li-S energy storage performance. Everyone is talking about developments in the field of energy storage, but it is only occasionally that we hear something about a technology that is different from lithium-ion. It is only recently that the attention is […]

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New Material Cools When Exposed to Sunlight, Could Make Us Ditch Air Conditioning

Ovidiu Sandru — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 12:30:48 +0000

A team of researchers at Stanford have invented a new and weird type of material that cools when exposed to sunlight. It could be used to insulate buildings, and reduce the need for energy-consuming air conditioning. The material, developed by Shanhui Fan, uses optical tricks to radiate heat whose frequency lies in our planet’s “thermal […]

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New Solar Materials Could Lower Hydrogen Energy Cost

Danny Harper — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 07:12:35 +0000

Up to this point, solar has made big gains in efficiency, but nothing near what is needed to effectively compete with fossil fuels. While parity is still a ways off, researchers at Stanford have found that by making materials more resilient, producing hydrogen energy through solar could become cheap enough to compete with its dirty counterpart. […]

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New Zinc-Air Batteries Developed at Stanford are Cheaper, Stabler, Better

Ovidiu Sandru — Thu, 30 May 2013 19:13:13 +0000

A new zinc-air battery with a redesigned and cheap catalyst has been brewed at Stanford – it could one day rival lithium ion batteries and come much cheaper. “With ample supply of oxygen from the atmosphere, metal-air batteries have drastically higher theoretical energy density than either traditional aqueous batteries or lithium-ion batteries. Among them, zinc-air […]

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Sugarcane Crops Showed to Cool Climate

Ovidiu Sandru — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:29:53 +0000

Sugarcane has been touted as a sort of an inefficient biofuel crop, since it consumes a lot of water and fertilizer, and hence its carbon footprint is not the best for such a purpose, compared to algae, for example. Sugarcane, on the other hand, can help cool the climate in a certain way.

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IBM and Stanford Discover Chemical Recycling of PETs at Low Temperatures

Ovidiu Sandru — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:18:58 +0000

Usually, plastic bottles, (aka PETs) are recycled by mechanical technologies, and they get several other uses afterwards: carpets, sweaters, etc. They don't ever return to their original water bottle use.It is possible to chemically recycle PETs, but the method has been so far very expensive and the industry doesn't want that option.

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Cheap Nanotube Sensors to Detect Toxins in Water

Mike Sandru — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:08:56 +0000

A research team at Stanford has developed a new inexpensive sensor chip made with carbon nanotubes, being capable to detect rapid traces of TNT and poison in rivers, reservoirs.

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